Abstract nude3.

While an artist may have a real object in mind when painting, that object might be stylized, distorted or exaggerated using colors and textures to communicate a feeling, rather than produce a replica.

It’s more about how the beauty of shapes and colors can override representational accuracy.

Abstraction is a ‘continuum’. Many art movements have been influenced by and employ abstract principles to a varying extent; the more removed from reality a painting or sculpture is, the more abstract it could be considered. 

Cubism, for example, with its distorted subjects, is highly abstract, whereas an Impressionist painting might be more conservatively so.